Clara Bell

Who is Clara Bell?

Clara Bell, née Poynter, was an English translator fluent in French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish, noted for her translations of works by Henrik Ibsen, Balzac, Georg Ebers, Huysmans, Maupassant, and others. She was educated in France, where she became fluent in French and German; she did not acquire her knowledge of the other languages until after her fortieth birthday. She spent most of her life in London.

Bell was born in Westminster to architect Ambrose Poynter and Emma Forster; her brother was Sir Edward Poynter, a director of the National Gallery. She was a distant relation of Edward Burne-Jones and Rudyard Kipling. She was married to banker Robert Courtenay Bell with whom she had six children, one of whom was Charles Francis Bell, who oversaw the Fine Art Department of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Under the direction of George Saintsbury, Bell, Ellen Marriage, and Rachel Scott were responsible for translating the vast majority of Balzac's Human Comedy into English, superseding earlier translations that had generally been regarded as stilted. The low pay that translators received at that time required Bell and her colleagues to complete work quickly, but her translations have nonetheless been noted for their close adherence to the source texts, and their high degree of readability.